Systems Engineer

📋 Description

• • Architect, deploy and continuously improve mission-critical network, compute and storage infrastructure that supports the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Biometric Identity Management (OBIM) Secure Enterprise Technology Services (SETS) program. Your designs will directly influence national security operations and must meet the highest standards for availability, integrity and confidentiality.
• • Own the complete lifecycle of data-center, systems and networking infrastructure—from initial requirements gathering and vendor evaluation through installation, configuration, performance tuning and eventual decommissioning. You will author detailed “as-built” documentation, maintain configuration baselines and enforce change-management policies so every modification is transparent, reversible and auditable.
• • Serve as the technical authority for hybrid and cloud-native computing, leveraging AWS services (EC2, EBS, S3, VPC, CloudWatch, CLI) to deliver elastic, cost-efficient solutions. You will right-size instances, implement auto-scaling groups, craft Infrastructure-as-Code templates and optimize spend through reserved and spot-instance strategies.
• • Automate everything. Build Ansible playbooks, Chef cookbooks or Puppet manifests that provision Linux and Windows servers, configure network devices (routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, VPN concentrators) and enforce security baselines. Your code will eliminate manual toil, reduce MTTR and free the team to focus on higher-order engineering challenges.
• • Provide advanced troubleshooting at both the physical layer (cabling, optics, power, environmental) and logical layer (TCP/IP, GRE, IPSec, TLS, QoS). You will analyze packet captures, system logs, metrics and telemetry to pinpoint root causes, then craft permanent fixes that prevent recurrence.
• • Design resilient, multi-tier architectures that incorporate virtualization (VMware, KVM) and containerization (Docker, Kubernetes) to maximize resource utilization and accelerate application delivery. You will implement load-balancing, clustering and disaster-recovery patterns that guarantee 99.9 % uptime.
• • Lead technical reviews for new network hardware and operating-system releases, producing detailed engineering assessments, risk analyses and migration plans. You will coordinate with security, development and operations teams to ensure seamless integration and minimal service disruption.
• • Mentor junior engineers and cross-train IT staff through formal workshops, brown-bag sessions and one-on-one coaching. You will translate complex technical concepts into clear guidance that empowers colleagues to operate, monitor and extend the infrastructure you build.
• • Drive continuous improvement by establishing KPIs, capacity-planning models and cost-benefit analyses. You will present findings to senior leadership and recommend strategic investments in emerging technologies that keep OBIM SETS at the forefront of innovation.
• • Participate in an on-call rotation providing Level-2/3 support, responding to incidents within SLA targets and authoring post-mortem reports that feed back into engineering practices. Your calm, methodical approach under pressure will be critical to restoring service during outages.